Online communities have become more prevalent in recent years. The online communities have developed into personal websites for individuals to present themselves to others. Social networking websites, such as myspace.com, is one example of an online community. Generally, these personal websites enable other users to interact by posting information and emailing the author of the website.
Problems that have developed in these online communities include identity misrepresentation for fun and mischief. For example, imposters may use another person's name and information to set up a website to misrepresent who the owner of the website actually is to disparage the actual person, embarrass the real person, draw attention to other websites for improper reasons, or other mischievous activity. More specifically, an imposter may set up a webpage and use a famous person's name and likeness (e.g., Tom Cruise), and promote a product, thereby making it look as if the famous person is endorsing the product when, in actuality, the endorsement is fraudulent. While this sort of activity may occur on an online community, it may also occur with other online activities, including websites for businesses. Furthermore, it is possible to create personal and business email accounts having the name of another in the email address so that emails can be sent to others for improper purposes (e.g., billclinton@hotmail.com).
A number of online applications have developed solutions to try and minimize the ability for online fraud to occur. One such online application is PAYPAL®, which is an online payment system. To verify a user or depositor has a bank account, the PAYPAL® online banking system requires that a user provides information for a real world bank account and the PAYPAL® online banking system deposits a small amount of money into the real world bank account and requires that the customer verify that the money is deposited.
Another online application called emigrantdirect.com, has customers fill out a form that provides a real world bank account. The emigrantdirect.com online banking system deposits two small amounts of money into the bank account and then the customer verifies the amounts that were deposited.
Another online application, ticketmaster.com, verifies that a user is human and not a web robot or web-bot. This system presents an image with a word and asks for the user to type in the word being displayed in the image. This type of system verifies that a human is using the website, but it does not authenticate who that user is.
While the above systems are helpful in ensuring that users of systems are human and have bank accounts, they fail to fully address authentication of users to avoid identity fraud by online community users.